The Traitors That are Leading Britain To Distruction…

As he became prime minister in June 2007, Gordon Brown looked back across a decade of power with pride and satisfaction. Speaking to the Lord Mayor’s banquet – an annual white tie report to the City itself, his words are worth quoting at length in case the reader is sceptical of the argument that Brown too was an architect of the neo-liberal polity:

“Over the ten years that I have had the privilege of addressing you as Chancellor, I have been able year by year to record how the City of London has risen by your efforts, ingenuity and creativity to become a new world leader…. Now today over 40 per cent of the world’s foreign equities are traded here, more than New York… 80 per cent of our business is international….

So I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London….

And I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created….

Britain…. a world leader in stability….

So let me say as I begin my new job, I want to continue to work with you in helping you do yours, listening to what you say, always recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain’s overall and considering together the things that we must do – and, just as important, things we should not do – to maintain our competitiveness… enhancing a risk based regulatory approach, as we did in resisting pressure for a British Sarbanes-Oxley after Enron and Worldcom….”

It was just such enhanced risk that permitted the credit-bubble catastrophe, and that regulation like Sarbanes-Oxley was designed to limit. The observer can only wonder about Brown’s lack of embarrassment and sheer attitude in refusing to acknowledge his pivotal part in urging on London’s lethal “casino capitalism” in this fashion.

The “Bitter Lemons” and “The British Fantasy Island Bubble”

It seems that all this has come to a juddering halt, as Alan Greenspan is left spluttering before Congress, John Maynard Keynes is retrieved from the lower circles of hell, and Labour ministers once more telephone Will Hutton to be their Virgil and interpret the great sage’s insights on finance capitalism and the economic cycle.

Initially there was a near-complete consensus amongst the political classes and the media that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, his Chancellor, managed the crisis in a masterful fashion. The adaptation of their rescue plan from a bailout to huge part-nationalisation of the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS won plaudits from across the political spectrum. In this view Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street have acted with lightning speed, with little protest over the lack of scrutiny, oversight or democratic debate, and the absence of public forums where people can realise their anger and dismay at those who got us into this mess.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/britain-s-neo-liberal-state